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By Root 768 0

make no mistake: I am onto You. You are no more starry-eyed about community and collaboration and “people power” and self-expression than is Brian Williams or Jonah Goldberg or Frank Rich; no more, for that matter, than am I. You blog and photograph and record precisely so you can be read and heard and seen by others. You monitor and you scheme and you promote, just like the hit-addled corporate culture has been teaching you for years. Because when your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends but to potentially thousands or even millions of strangers, it changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as a character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning. You develop, that is, the media mind. You know exactly what you are doing.

THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD

“If you can measure it, you can manage it,” I heard a man behind the podium at a marketing conference say. He attributed this remark to the late-nineteenth-century scientist and engineer Lord Kelvin—whom he called “a pretty big data geek himself, back in the day”—but added, “The quote is actually much more Old English than that.” The full quote, as it happens, takes as its subject not management but science itself, and it is much beloved of scientists, appearing on some fifteen thousand different websites in its original not-quite-Old-English, which reads as follows:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.

Kelvin’s point is that data is a necessary undergirding of science—indeed, data engenders science. And this is a crucial insight to understanding viral culture. For the better part of a century, corporations have seen culture through a lens of numbers, from 1926, when Maxwell Sackheim invented the Book-of-the-Month Club and began the hardening of the art of direct marketing into a statistical science; to 1936, when George Gallup used a scientifically selected random sample to correctly call the presidential election for FDR; to 1941, when the sociologist Robert Merton convened the first “focus group,” a tool that marketers would quickly use to wed the wisdom of polling to the qualitative insights of small-group conversations; and so on into the rest of the century, with its Nielsen ratings and demographic profiling and direct marketing. Corporate America has had the numbers and has used them to conduct its profit-seeking experiments on all of us.

But the Internet is revolutionary in how it has democratized not just culture-making but culture monitoring, giving individual creators a profusion of data with which to identify trends surrounding their own work and that of others. On YouTube, a video’s poster—or anyone else who cares to check—is privy to the kind of internals that TV executives can only dream of: not just real-time rankings of how often a video has been viewed, but which other videos a fan is likely to enjoy as well, based on the behavior of other users. For music, the story is the same: on MySpace, a band can track which of its songs are downloaded more and how this compares to other bands. This shift has seeped into the old media as well—writers for print newspapers or magazines, through their site’s “most e-mailed” lists, can see precisely which of their articles attain the heights of ubiquity and which fall into oblivion. If one’s built-in numbers do not provide enough market intelligence, there are countless other sites to consult. How many bloggers have linked to your site? The search engine Technorati will tell you, and also show you what those bloggers have to say. How is your site doing versus the competition? At Alexa.com you can see not only your site’s rank in its category but also plot it against other sites you choose.

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